


The Memory

by SuddenWhispers



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Big Sister Mila, Gen, Teen Angst, Young Victor Nikiforov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 19:10:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21086378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuddenWhispers/pseuds/SuddenWhispers
Summary: Written for YOILitMag. Yuri's brightest memories are of Victor. A pre-canon look at Yuri Plisetsky's relationship with Victor Nikiforov.





	The Memory

_Touch me_  
_It's so easy to leave me _  
_All alone with the memory_  
_of my days in the sun  
\-- "Memory", _Cats

Yuri Plisetsky’s brightest memory happened in the dark of night.

He is thirteen when Yakov takes his trainees to the beaches of Ibiza in celebration of Russia’s prized skater Victor Nikiforov and his 3rd consecutive gold. No one dares to refuse the offer — if a smile from Yakov is a needle in a haystack, then a gift is a diamond in the rough.

The night is alive, ablaze with light and dancing with music between bodies swaying in time at the local beach bars. It’s the perfect time and place to dance as if no one’s watching, he thinks to himself. Chances are that everyone is either drunken into stupor or high on the freedom of inhibition to even notice him.

He pictures it with all the clarity of the mirrored sea at high noon: folding himself between fenced holes and snaking his way through heavy heat and taking his place beneath flashing whirls of light.

It is seldom that he gets to dance as himself without the burden of a constricting costume or the judging eyes of Yakov measuring every curve and angle of his movements. Just for tonight, he is free. Just for tonight, he is free to be himself.

But until the night grows older, Yuri can only speculate from the balcony of his hotel room on the 18th floor. His rinkmate Mila, who is 16 and too fiesty for her own good, shoots him a look, a mischievous glint visible from the corner of his eye.

“C’mon, Yuri!” She tugs playfully at his arm but his body refuses to budge, instead slumping over the balcony railing. “No one will notice us with Victor prancing around, I promise!”

“You just want to dance at a club,” Yuri has to shake her off to free himself. She crosses her arms in a huff, sticking her tongue out.

“Don’t try to hide it,” she says with a waggle of her brow. “You want to go too.”

He scoffs at the statement. “I never said I wouldn’t.”

By the time they reach the beachfront, the embers dull and the rainbow disco pales as Victor sets aside his drink, loosens the top button his shirt, and strides onto a dance floor he makes his own in one single, fluid motion. Even as the music begins to heighten from the silence falling around his presence, Yuri knows better — the show had already begun long ago.

Even in Yuri’s memories, Victor is always center stage.

As he spirals into a drunken, albeit perfect arabesque, Victor gaze falls onto Yuri through the crowd for a split second. His poised hand lingers in the air for a second longer, as if to say _I see you_, before his head snaps away for the turn.

Yuri’s hand instinctively reaches towards him a second too late, grasping the ghost of Victor’s movements. In Yuri’s memories, he’s reaching for Victor against the glass of Grandfather’s mid-century television set. He remembers wondering if Victor could see him too, the way his hands longingly reach for the screen that separates them. Since then, Yuri was convinced that his path has already been carved out on the ice.

Years ago, he sat mere inches from Grandfather’s old television and light years away from Victor in every way possible. Yet here he is now, enveloped in the same world and close enough for him to feel the wind that follows Victor’s slightest movements.

Yuri looks down at his own hands, which are more graceful and less pudgy now than when he was 5, and thinks of the distance left between them.

The night winds down to a gentle burn and Mila and Yuri are left wandering in the midsts of the disco lights of an empty dance floor. Mila twirls amongst the light, hair loose and untamed in the sea salt air. Before Yuri has time to object, he finds himself doing the same, hand in hand with Mila, their steps feather-light and matched in time.

In their youthful wonder, Victor eyes them pensively from the sidelines with both admiration and jealousy.

“I envy the youth,” he calls out to them, and they halt in their steps. “Skating is the only thing that keeps me young.”

Mila chuckles in response. “You mean skating with _us_ keeps you young?”

“No,” he says, his gaze and voice oddly distant. “The ice lets me be myself. If I can inspire young people like you to skate when I skate, I’ll be happy.”

Victor takes both of Mila’s hands and spins her around on the empty floor, floating through the sea of lights to the acute bass of the speakers. Yuri isn’t exempted for very long. In a single swift motion, Victor takes his free hand as the three of them spin in carefree circles.

Yuri tightens his grip, closing the gap between them. To be as free and inspired as Victor is in this moment — Yuri wants to remember this forever.

He takes the moment into memory and turns it into a dream.

\-----

It isn’t long before Yuri wakes up from the dream.

He is fifteen now, barreling at full speed towards his first competition in the senior division. It is a cloudless morning in St. Petersburg when Yuri hears the news of Victor’s leave from skating.

No one could have anticipated such a sudden move — no one except for the heavens, perhaps. It is common knowledge that a sky without clouds is an omen not to be trifled with.

Yuri storms out of practice soon after, a silent storm brewing beneath his scowl. When all he’s able to mutter is a seething “this is bull” instead of his usual tirades, no one, not even Mila, dares to pursue him.

“Let him go,” Yakov announces to the rest of them. If Victor was his compass, Yuri needs to find his own way now. Yakov knows this well.

The streets of St. Petersburg are still serene in slumber when he steps out from the familiar chill of the rink. Ten years in this city and Yuri still finds no trace of home. More than half of his life away from his hometown, and he’s decided that St. Petersburg will never be home in the same way Moscow always will be.

Now, his home is wherever the ice takes him, he forces himself to believe. It is what he tells himself upon his waking hour and at every practice.

He almost believes it. Except he doesn’t, because with Victor off the ice, the path has vanished before his eyes.

Memories of burn bright in his mind. The distance is a lie now that Victor only exists off the ice.

A plethora of reasons flash through his mind. Excuses, he corrects himself. It is the same way his mother, who once dreamed of the same freedom in dance, left the stage for a life of solitude after having sold that very freedom she so fervently sought after.

His mother threw it all away: fame, fortune, family. He swears not to make the same mistake.

The pangs of betrayal course over his skin. How could Victor throw it all away? How could someone as free as Victor, someone as inspired and inspiring as he, leave the place he feels most at home and most himself?

If everything Victor stands for is a lie, how can Yuri expect to feel at home and be himself on the ice?

By the time the first cars pave the streets and the sun is above the horizon in its entirety, Yuri doesn’t recognize the part of town he’s in.

It doesn't matter — he will not succumb to mediocrity the same way his mother did. He will become a threat to Victor’s title and bring him back to the ice, bring him home.

He pulls the hood over his eyes, stuffs his hands in his pockets, and continues towards unknown territory.

If there is no path left on the ice, he’ll just have to continue paving the one left behind. If not Yuri, who will?

He begins to leave himself behind.

\--

Yuri doesn’t remember when it was no longer enough merely just to reach Victor. Now, he needs to surpass him. His first Grand Prix Final in the senior division will determine if he’s truly capable of it.

When the Grand Prix Final arrives at last, Barcelona is an electric current under the stars, saturated with the bells of Christmas and buzz of the competition. It takes everything for Yuri to hold his tongue when he hears Victor’s name exchanged between laughs and wistful sighs, but he shakes the thoughts out of his head — he cannot afford to spare even a thought for a skater gone from the world of competition.

Yuri finds himself climbing any stairs he could find that would lead him to higher ground, retreating to the silence above the crowds, to be sandwiched between city lights and starlight. As he ascends towards the highest heights of the Sagrada Familia, his jaw clenches tight in frustration.

Everything he’s sacrificed up until now — his home, his time, his life — will not be in vain. Yuri refuses to throw it all away the same way Victor did.

“Are you lost, little kitten?”

Yuri curses himself for the possibility that he’s summoned Victor with his thoughts alone.

Victor smiles and offers one of his cups. “I can take you back if you’d like,” he says with an abnormal cheeriness that only makes Yuri want to punch him harder.

“Piss off, I’m not lost,” he seethes. Yuri shoulders past him almost with the force of a tackle, avoiding Victor’s expectant gaze. “I’d rather sleep on the streets if it came to that, thanks.”

He wants him to stumble, to fall, to make him realize how insignificant he is in the face of time. But Victor doesn’t stumble, doesn’t fall. He doesn’t even flinch, as if he’s already braced himself for what is coming for him, for what he deserves. Does he believe in what he deserves?

“You’ll regret it, you know,” Victor calls out after him, the words hitting Yuri’s back.

Yuri halts. He doesn’t mean to, but the words sound like a challenge, and Yuri isn’t known to back down from one.

“I thought I was free on the ice. But no one is free from the public eye. You don’t get to decide who you are on the ice so long as they’re watching.”

Yuri’s heart drops at the weight of those words. He has to bite his tongue from behind clenched teeth and bunch his sleeves in tight fists. Below, the festivities of the plaza bleed into grey until Yuri is only acutely aware of words that ring with an uncomfortable truth.

For years, Yuri has been chasing gold, barreling after all that he’s known. For every gold won, a different performance. A different costume. A different face. What makes him any different from Victor?

He hadn’t realized the burden of being between choices, of how being himself had also begun to make him predictable. Mediocre. How his greatest desire was also his greatest fear.

Somewhere along the way, Yuri had already learned this and accepted this as truth. But it didn’t give Victor the right to give up the fight and leave.

Victor’s voice startles him out of his thoughts. “Don’t make the same mistake I did. Or at the very least, don’t take so long to find out for yourself.”

“I used to believe in you and who you were.” Yuri’s voice is thin, trembling like the high winds. He hates himself for it, but to be weak in this singular moment is who he is.

“Bury the memory. I’m not the same person I was yesterday and I’ll never be the same person I was all those years ago. But you should know that I’m happier for it.”

Yuri feels Victor’s presence fade against the backdrop of the merriness of Barcelona coming back into focus. “I don’t want to hear that from you,” Yuri says to no one in particular.

He has decided that he is nothing like Victor. Unlike Victor, he refuses to throw away the gold, even if it means denying himself. He will not be bound by the same gravity that broke Victor.

Days later, at the unsteady age of 15, Yuri Plisetsky breaks world records.

\--

No one tells you that once you reach gold, there’s no turning back. The euphoria of gold under his name is dampened by an unsettling thorn in his side.

He has achieved everything Victor has and more. He has captivated his audience, the world, with a performance he was able to pull off. Why isn’t he satisfied?

When Yuri confronts Otabek about his own uncertainty, he already knows what to say: “It feels like you’re missing something.”

Otabek speaks without as much as a glance towards Yuri. He appreciates him for that: how Otabek understands how to be straightforward without breaking a man, how to hit the mark without injuring the heart.

The path continues and the road forks. The journey does not end here.

“I won’t bother asking what you’re missing. You already know what it is, don’t you,” Otabek later says. The words come more as a statement than a question.

Later, as he sits alone with his thoughts, Yuri breathes into sleeved hands, his eyes on the steady rise of steam from between his fingers. It gathers in front of him the way St. Petersburg’s fog skirts the horizon at dawn, clouding the future beyond the curve of the earth.

“If I don’t change, I’ll be riding on the coattails of what people want me to be,” he says out loud, to no one in particular. “What’s missing from my performance,” Yuri pauses, “is something of my own.”

It’s missing the human element of choice - to be able to choose who he is, he thinks to himself. He has been stumbling after himself for so long — where did he lose himself along the way?

Yuri has been chasing a memory, a version of Victor that once was but no longer exists. It is all he has left of those times to hold. They slip as free as air through his fingers, but he knows that it doesn’t make the moment any less real.

He will always keep those fragments of time — of Victor with his glass smile from behind the glass screen safe within the confines of the box, ready to shatter at any moment.

From behind his own glass screen, he can only think of how beautiful it would be to watch them all break.

The next morning, long after breakfast had settled in their stomachs and their eyes free from the fog of sleep, Mila catches him by the shoulder on their way out.

“Just have fun and be yourself, ok?” She says, bubbly and bright-eyed before running ahead to catch up with the other female skaters.

Here he is, given the chance to be himself in front of the world. If Yuri’s allowed this chance, why shouldn’t Victor? Why shouldn’t anyone? No one should be denied the right to be themselves.

These are the thoughts he carries to his exhibition.

Yuri waits on the sidelines, intently watching the silver medalist dance to the song that, for him, began it all. It is a dance to the memory of being alone, an homage to life before Victor.

From across the ice and below the sea of faces, Victor smiles and it blooms into a faint softness in his eyes when he’s with Yuuri. This melts away years of facades, as if to say _I have found a way to be myself._

Their performance ends with a roaring crowd. In the next minute, he will be alone in the eye of the storm, under the eyes of a million people.

He imagines a 16-year old Victor standing on the same ice, paralyzed for fraction of a second by a choice he didn’t even know he had:

_Do I dare to be me?_

Yuri can’t help but think: _Do I dare to be anyone else?_

He wants to tell Victor from 3 years ago: You were looking for something. You were looking for yourself.

Yuri takes the ice. The lights flash and the shades come off.

He buries the memory.


End file.
